Information systems have important strategic impact on global business which is profound in variety of Industrial sectors like retail, manufacturing, services, healthcare, insurance, telecom and government. Organizations in these sectors are supported by islands of information systems made up of new and old, compatible and not-so-compatible software providing functionality in some identified and chosen aspect of business. Each system internally house-keep transactions, support processes and host business decisions to realize the functionality. They provide a platform that enable organizations to integrate and coordinate their business processes and ensure that information is shared across all functional levels and management hierarchies in the organization. As businesses evolve, business plans are constructed and business decisions made to move from the current business to the target business. These plans and decisions are propagated to the organization's information systems so that corresponding transactions and processes can be supported.
There are three primary segments in each of these sectors by customer size: Enterprises, Mid-Market and Small Companies. Statistics show that there are more than 200-300 Enterprise information systems (SAP, J D Edwards, People-soft, IBM, Oracle) for Performance, Finance and Accounting, Human Resource, Supply Chain, Payroll, Banking, Insurance, Customer, Enterprise Resource, Telecom, Travel amounts in every medium to enterprise companies. Statistics also show that there are huge disconnects in maintaining information integrity and information fragments exist in Enterprise and Mid-Market companies. Currently manual labor is involved in maintaining information integrity and reducing information fragmentation.